The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (2 page)

T
he boy wanted a new name. He'd read about boys in Africa who at a certain point in time officially became men, and to celebrate they're given special spears, tiny as toothpicks, which someone else inserts into their penis, and also they get a bride and a mask. There was a ceremony full of bloody cattle and drums where something that represented your old name, a symbol, got thrown right into the fire. It crackled and was dead. He could go without the penis spear, the bride, but loved the idea of a new name, of igniting the old one which was incidental, a
word,
his own word so plain and flat it made him feel middle-aged. What was the special age for those kids in Africa? When were they allowed to shed themselves? Probably not ten, he reasoned.

Tonight was his birthday. He was ten. It was a Saturday evening early in the spring of 1980. The Miracle on Ice had happened, and it felt to him like that was it, that was the miracle for his era, and he was sad. Once upon a time miracles were bigger, Jesus or Joan of Arc for instance. It was a quiet disappointment, to live in an age where miracles were relegated to sports. He didn't have anything against sports—if he became a professional athlete he had a name chosen: Felix Castoff. (If he became an actor: Gregory Dubuque.) Sure, he was proud of that hockey team. He loved America, loved the underdog, loved the myth that Americans had underdog souls, but the word
miracle
made him feel somehow gypped.

Most of the time he felt trapped by his childhood. It was like watching TV, a decent show, and then a commercial comes on and lasts too long, an advertisement for oldies but goodies, song titles scrolling endlessly across the screen, when all he wanted was to discover the fate of the bank robber or the bound-and-gagged girl. He hated commercials but loved television. The girl always got untied, she was always okay, and if she wasn't it was because she was the wrong kind of girl to begin with.

His mother went by “Goldie.” Her real name was something she never spoke aloud. He assumed it must be hideous, for her eyes narrowed and mouth puckered whenever he asked about it. At some point he'd stopped asking. But then, one day, poking around in her drawers, he came upon an official document and saw her real name, there in clear type: Maureen Lynn. Maureen Lynn? What was so shameful about Maureen Lynn? He couldn't ask her.

He called her “Ma.” She called him by his name, or sometimes “Sugarlump.”

Maybe in some part of the world turning ten meant freedom, meant you were given a bow and arrow or a bazooka and told to go off and forge your path, but not here. They sat across from each other at a card table. A vase of white carnations between them, a birthday cake, a white balloon tied to the back of his chair. His name was Paul, but it didn't have to be forever.

“You're a big boy now,” Goldie was saying. “It's time you get the straight story. You want the straight story?”

He said he wanted to eat cake.

Goldie didn't seem to hear him. She said, “Let me tell you loud and clear: the truth has not vanished from the earth. Don't believe the hype.”

“The hype?”

“People are still capable of honesty. Not just Christians. Regular folks. You and me.”

It pleased him, he couldn't help it, that she called them “regular.” Was it true?

On the table the cake beckoned sadistically. It wasn't fair, making him look for so long. A matchbox car sat buried to its axles in frosting. No one made a cake like Goldie. Her cakes were gritty, riotously sweet, pleasantly chalky.

“I'll give you as much truth as you can take. When you don't want any more, you say so. Say the word and I'll stop.”

He agreed to this plan.

“Truth number one: Your father was a fraud and a dud. You know what a dud is?”

He didn't.

“A dud is can't get it up for more than thirty seconds.” She cocked her head, paused. “You know what I mean by ‘it'?”

She poured herself more gin.

“His weenie,” she said. She laughed.

“Yes,” he said.

The matchbox car was red with a blue stripe across its top. He wanted to lick its undercarriage. His hunger distressed him, by and large. He had a memory of a man—his father?—it wasn't clear, the memory was dim, there had been many men. This one was sitting on the floor of the kitchen eating marshmallow Fluff, scooping it from the jar with his fingers, no spoon, wide-eyed, desperate, in the manner of a bloated raccoon. He said, “Why is he a fraud?”

His mother took another swallow, set her tumbler on the tabletop. “He's a fraud because he told me he'd put me through college, and told me he'd never met someone so pretty, and that he never wanted to touch another lady on this good green earth and that he'd be honored to have me as his last.”

He asked what was the difference between a fraud and a liar.

She thought about it. “A fraud is someone whose whole being, body and soul, is full of lies, all the organs, the skin, not a pore free of them. A liar is a person who tells stories now and then. You and me, we're just liars.”

He wanted to lick the wheels of the car, but his mother held him at bay. She was the guard of cake, guard of everything.

“Your father once carved an animal out of my complexion soap. Then he yelled at me when I used it to wash my face. That soap was not cheap.”

“What kind of animal?”

“How should I remember?”

She wore a red dress with a draping cowl-neck, a red-beaded necklace, and cork-heeled sandals. Her perfume evoked baby powder. The heavily plucked brows, teal liner, gave her eyes a slight bulge. She'd been drinking steadily for nearly an hour, growing impulsive, spiteful, knowing.

“Truth number two—I need a cigarette. That's not the truth. Well, it's
true,
but it's not the one I was getting at. Go in Mama's purse and grab a fiddlestick, Paul.”

He obliged. It helped to have tasks. It helped when he had a mother whose demands could be met. A friend at school had a chore chart affixed to his refrigerator; Paul longed for such a thing.

He lit the cigarette for her. She took a drag, closed her eyes. “He'll be here soon,” she said, exhaling, and he heard a flicker of apprehension in her voice. “Mister Clover.”

He returned to his seat across from her.

He wished Mister Clover would ditch them, and he said so. He knew he wasn't supposed to say it aloud; it was the barest transgression.

“He thinks I could be a model,” said Goldie. “Can you imagine it? He wants to take some pictures.”

“I can imagine it.”

A boy in his class had asked Paul if he'd ever seen his mother nude, and if so could he pick out a crayon that best matched the shade of her bush.

“He's bringing his camera over tonight. He's going to take some shots and show them to the manager at McFee's. They need merchandise models. Can you see that? McFee's today,
Vogue
tomorrow. That brings me to truth two.”

“Numero dos,”
said Paul.

“Good boy.
Dos. Dos
is that even though your pops was a louse—”

“You didn't say louse. You said fraud and dud.”

He wanted to know his father because it might tell him what was inside himself. He suspected some wrongness had been bred into him, and that only by knowing it fully could he stand a chance of escaping it.
Fraud, dud, louse.
He'd carry these words forever; all his life he'd hold them up to his experiences, one by one, as a person holds a paint sampler to a wall, seeking a match. At ten his instinct was simply to collect the words. At ten he thought: I was born from my mother's head! He had learned in a book about Athena. He pictured his mother, bulging eyes, bloody brain, his fetal body slipping naked from her cranium onto the kitchen linoleum. Oh he wasn't stupid. He knew about ovaries and all, just liked this idea better.

He couldn't picture his father's face. Supposedly he'd been a man whose modest handsomeness he drank away with Old Grand-Dad. But tonight Paul learned that he'd carved things from soap. It unsettled the account; it made a decent man of the figure scooping Fluff with his fingers.

Dud, fraud, louse.

His mother said, “I'm trying to tell you something here. You want to listen?”

“Wait,” Paul said. “What's a louse?”

“Like a bug.” He could tell she was getting impatient.

“What kind of bug?”

“I don't know,” Goldie said. “Like a roach, how's that?”

“I like roaches.”

“I know you do, Paul. I'm not sure why.”

“I don't like Beetles,” he said. This was a joke; Beetle was the name of their town.

“It doesn't matter. Your father behaved like a bug. But my whole drift is that even though he's a louse, and you're his flesh and blood, you are not a louse. You need to remember that.”

“I wouldn't mind being a roach. They live for millions of years. Their shells are armor. They can get into anywhere. I opened a box of cereal once and there was a roach inside. The box wasn't even opened. How did it do that?”

“Oh they creep me out. Please stop.”

“Some have wings,” he said.

“Clover used to be an exterminator. He's been lots of things. He was once a housepainter and a guitar teacher. Now he's an artist, a photographer.” She pressed her tongue against the rim of her glass. “I have a model's face, maybe, but my hips are too big. That's truth number—what number am I on? Three. These hips are too big. Do you know what they call these things?” She put down her cup, patted her flanks.

“What?”

“Mama hips.” She laughed brightly, and looked at her watch, and stopped laughing. “He's late. I did my hair and all. He's bringing his camera. I made this cake.”

Paul stared at the cake, his cake.

“The car is mine, right? It's not Mister Clover's birthday.”

“I told you ten times.”

She had cleaned the house for the occasion. She had baked the cake and shaved her legs to the thighs. The cake looked good, her legs were smooth, but the house looked exactly the same. It was collapsing in its slow, powdery way, outside and in, bricks crumbling, foundation rotting, the roof patched with tar paper. In gaps between splintering floorboards was the dust and dirt from five years of their life here, this mulchy cottage, just the two of them. The floorboard nails had loosened, rose up, caught sometimes on their socks. She paid Paul a dime for each one he hammered down again. He was good with tools, had a certain grace with a hammer—an innate confidence. Women weren't born good with tools, she didn't care what Gloria Steinem said. It's easy to have an opinion when you look like Sophia Loren.

The place was tucked into a wooded area at the east end of town. Once it had been the guest cottage of a stately manor, but when its owners fell on hard times they burned the big house to the ground for the insurance money. This was decades ago. The cottage, by luck of wind, managed to be spared the flames. Its meager charm derived from a stone fireplace, a claw-foot tub, and a massive door knocker in the shape of an owl.

“My face is perfect for McFee's,” she said, and touched the wave in her hair to make sure it hadn't faded.

“I'm hungry.”

“Don't whine.”

He said it again in a deeper, even voice.

In the tiny dining room, a thin robin's-egg cloth covered the card table. A shelf in the corner held their mismatched dishes, silverware propped in a mug. She had swept each room, scrubbed the kitchen's peeling linoleum, plucked cobwebs from corners. She had even bleached the bathtub, her favorite place, where she spent hours reading magazines, napping, or writing letters she would never post to the boy's father. She'd swept and scrubbed, and Paul had hammered errant nails back into place, but even so the cottage looked the same.

“Truth number five,” she said. She poured the last of the gin.

“You're on four.”

“Four? Fine. Truth four.”

He did not like it when she drank. When Goldie was sober she talked, she talked quite a lot actually, but not like this. Her chest took on a lacy flush, and she ran her index finger back and forth along her clavicle. The local boys wanted to know what was inside her underpants. Their fathers wanted to know what was in her underpants. Paul kicked Mike Fitzpatrick in the kneecap and was suspended for three days when Mike said he'd like to put a dollar in his mother's underpants.

“Truth four: Mister Clover is the real deal. He's a gentle soul. He just might turn out to be the white horse. You have to keep an open mind. Can you do that?”

“I'm hungry,” he said.

“There's applesauce. Or olives.”

“I'm hungry for cake.”

Goldie wanted a perfect evening. Mister Clover would see that they'd waited. He was bringing his camera. He had spoken about a portfolio. Her face could bare her soul, he'd predicted. He had spoken about cheekbones and the brightness of eyes and he used the word
incandescence
. In his presence she was nervous and quiet, like an animal stunned by a superior beast.

“Another truth,” Goldie said. “We're poor.”

“Number five,” Paul said.

“Number five and six and seven, honey.”

Goldie had one hundred and seventy-eight dollars in the bank. She was a grocery clerk at McCauley's and sometimes babysat a pair of toddler twins and sometimes weeded the garden of the spinster across the road. There was a bowling alley half an hour away; once in a while she helped out there, spraying Lysol into shoes and laughing at the owner's dirty jokes.

“Get yourself some applesauce.”

The boy obeyed, trudged into the kitchen. He was wearing pale blue pajamas, the broad-lapelled sort worn by old men, and plush slippers resembling baseball mitts.

They were poor and she was pretty, and there had to be a way to capitalize on beauty that didn't involve the weary, circular articulation of one's hips as one stood on a slippery bar above a throng of men in white T-shirts. Pretty people didn't need to suffer the way she was suffering. Mister Clover had told her so.